What Wise Old Women Know

What Wise Old Women Know

Become a teacher of 12 year olds, and you will finally understand what it feels like to be Taylor Swift.

They will braid your hair by the fountain at pick-up, early in the morning, coming from every corner of the city to learn, yawning but braiding intricately and laughing anyway, while you wait for the other learners who travel even further to get to you.

You will think your outfit is normal, not fit for the Celebrity theme of the day, satisfied with your spirited contribution of the leopard print toga and your dark eye shadow-whiskers, the ones that wouldn’t come off and smeared all over your pillow case, the day before on Animal Day.

But that’s not enough for them. They will look at you early in the morning light of Texas you are so unaccustomed to, already close to 90 degrees, and they will find the Taylor Swift within you.

They’ll braid your hair more intricately and gently and impossibly than anyone ever has, their small hands like prehistoric creatures in rapturous flight. They’ll touch your thick, curly hair and you’ll explain your Jewish heritage.

They don’t care that you aren’t wearing red lipstick. Or that you can’t sing. Or that you are 5’2” tall and far from glamorous, instead groggy and thinking about how to best explain the structure of bone the next day with cups, garbage bags and Twizzlers.

They do not notice the pizza grease stain on your long, grey Gap skirt, the one you wear to Orthodox sites and teaching because it is that modest. And you forget about it too, lost in their joy of finding Taylor Swift and asking for her autograph.

Later at lunch, when it is time for all the more obviously dressed-up teachers to take a picture, you do not join them. You have forgotten after a lesson on bowels and bronchi that you are, in fact, after all, although you didn’t know it, the one and only Taylor Swift.

They notice. You do not realize this at the time, but they do.

Right before dismissal, the officially dressed-up teachers go up to the stage at the front of the auditorium to introduce their celebrity selves. At first you do not join them, but then again, you cannot argue with twenty 12 year olds.

Life-lesson learned: Don’t even bother. They are more often right than wrong anyway.

So you go up to join the mass of impressively costumed colleagues. You wait ‘til the end to announce your Taylor-ness. Finally, when you do, you ramble on about how you did not intend to be Taylor Swift, but that your kids showed you that, in fact, you were Taylor all along.

At this, two of your favorite kids smack their foreheads and shake their heads side to side with the vigor of Michael Jackson back-up dancers, horrified that you let the world know you were not always the one and only Taylor Swift.

They do not look like 12 year old Bieber fans; They look like perfectly wise old women, the kind you saw when you yourself were also 12, when you lived in Italy and visited Sicily, the ones who sold fish out by the church, their ancient faces poised against marble and newspaper, gold crosses and black dresses and stockings, talking, talking, talking, shaking and nodding, coming closer to eternity than you have ever known. They shake their heads as they discuss their grandson’s inability to marry, and they keep the whole world pinned up and clean like fresh laundry.

Your beautiful girls shake and smack, shake and smack. You know they are thinking, How could she be so stupid!

They do not yet know that even more than being their Taylor Swift, you love being their Ms. Hannah.

In fact, you have never loved your name so much as now, carried by their soft voices in a caramel chorus.

You have revealed to the world you are Ms. Hannah, not Taylor, but they cheer anyway. And as you descend the stage and move back to join them, their Ms. Hannah! How could you! is perhaps the most beautiful thing you have ever heard.